Summer's Song and Other Essays - Book

Summer's Song and Other Essays - This is Don L. Johnson’s final book. Summer's Song and Other Essays, was his long-awaited collection of 115 of his best short essays on nature and wildlife. Johnson, who lost his battle to cancer in January 2006, was among Wisconsin's best known outdoor writers. In 2000, Wisconsin Outdoor Journal named him as among The Century Honor Roll of twenty individuals who had the greatest influence on hunting, fishing and conservation in Wisconsin during the 20th century. During his long career, Johnson was known as an adventurer who hiked, hunted, fished, and photographed in such far-flung places as Africa, Cuba, the Andes, the Amazon, Mexico, the Yukon and Alaska, but he was also as a tenacious investigative reporter who blew the whistle on DDT and other pollutants in the environment, and who challenged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as they tried to ditch and drain the Cache River bottomlands in Arkansas.

Johnson was also the man who simply went for strolls in the woods, taking notes which he crafted into vignettes. The walks were the basis for most of the essays now collected in Summer's Song, many of which were initially published in the Milwaukee Sentinel while he worked there from 1962 to 1984 as the outdoor writer for that newspaper